Sliced bacon is normally packaged in a hermetically sealed plastic envelope, bearing suitable indicia identifying the product and packager or it may be placed in a cardboard sheet package having this information. In most instances, the bacon is sliced and arranged in shingle form and prior to sealing in the envelope a predetermined measure of segregated slices is placed on a cardboard sheet. In the past, the segregated group of slices were placed on the cardboard sheet manually by attendants located at the discharge end of the bacon slicing machine and prior to packaging of the bacon, or, more recently, most bacon lines have been equipped with an automatic cardboard sheet dispenser.
An automatic dispenser frequently used is the No. 1026 Cardboard Dispenser manufactured and marketed by The Allbright-Nell Company a division of Chemetron Corporation, Chicago, Ill. In a dispenser of this type, cardboard sheets are normally stacked in a magazine inclined relative to the horizontal. Pneumatically actuated suction cups take individual cardboard sheets from the magazine and place them between the nip of rollers which transfer each cardboard sheet under a chain conveyor on which is travelling segregated sliced bacon segregated in groups of predetermined measure or a predetermined weight i.e. one-half pound or one pound. A pusher under the conveyor is actuated by an electriceye which senses the presence of a segregated group of slices travelling on the conveyor and pushes a card at the trailing end of the chain conveyor. The travel of the card and the travel of the bacon package are timed such that the group will be deposited on the cardboard sheet.
The Marshall et al U.S. Pat. No. 3,405,504 granted Oct. 15, 1968 to Chemetron Corporation for Transferring System on an application filed Oct. 21, 1965 discloses such a dispenser. The conveying line consists of two sequential continuously operating conveyors. Shingled bacon units from the first conveyor are transferred onto the second conveyor. A magazine holding stacked cards is mounted on a support at one side of the conveying unit. A vacuum cup mounted on a pivoted arm which can reciprocate in two separate planes at right angles to each other transfers the cards one at a time from the magazine to a pair of feed rollers which feed the individual cards to a supporting platen beneath the first conveyor. From there, a pusher arm pushes the card forwardly to a pair of feed rollers which feed the card onto the leading edge of the second conveyor immediately beneath the sliced bacon unit as it transfers from the end of the first conveyor to the second conveyor. One of the feed rollers is the pulley at the leading end of the second conveyor so as to insure feeding the card at the same speed as the second conveyor. So as to time and control the device, a sensing unit is provided in the form of a light beam source at one side of the conveyor focused onto a mirror beneath the center of the conveyor which directs the light beam onto a photocell about the central portion of the conveyor so that the light beam is interrupted by a passing unit of sliced bacon. A safety device is provided to render the sensing device inactive if the beam is only interrupted for a minimum period of time as by a scrap of bacon.
There are a number of difficulties with prior art automatic cardboard sheet dispensers, as for example, the inability to handle and accommodate cardboard sheets of larger size and particularly the type of cardboard sheet, that, in essence, completely surrounds the sliced product. In addition, the prior art dispenser utilized an inclined magazine for storaging the cardboard sheets. A magazine of this type has severe limitations as to the number of cardboard sheets that it can store and also storage of cardboard sheets in this manner results in feeding problems of the cardboard sheets to the discharge station as they are removed from the magazine. In other words, the inclination of the magazine caused faulty feeding problems of the stacked cardboard sheets.